Steve Fossett

Steve Fossett, adventurer and record-breaker, was declared dead on February 15th, aged 63

THE aircraft in which Steve Fossett took off from the Flying M ranch in Nevada on September 3rd 2007 was nothing special. It was not the stiff white dragonfly GlobalFlyer, a delicate construction of carbon fibre with all its interstices filled with fuel, in which in 2005 he had made the first non-stop solo flight round the world. Nor was it the silvery inflated sphere, ten storeys high and fitted with giant propane burners, in which in 2002 he had made the first solo circumnavigation of the globe by balloon. It was a Bellanca Super Decathlon two-seater with a single engine, one of several sitting round the ranch that day, in which Mr Fossett might leave as casually as a boy might take a bike ride to the grocery store.

Nor did he plan to be away long. The man who had once spent 67 hours flying in a seven-foot coffin round the world, sustained by protein milkshakes and a catheter and kept awake by talking to Richard Branson, had reckoned to be back by lunchtime. Accordingly, where he had sometimes climbed on board with 20lb of aeronautical maps, enough supplies to fill an aisle of Walgreen's and, for quieter moments, “War and Peace”, he now took only a bottle of water with him, and no parachute.

There was therefore probably something in the conviction of his friends that he had gone up simply for pleasure: to ride the wind-patterns, enjoy the desert landscape, rejoice in his own adventure, and come down again. Except that Mr Fossett very rarely did things just for pleasure. He wanted to achieve, to endure and to excel, and behind his gentle manner lay a tiger's determination. Just down the road too, in Sparks, was a warehouse containing the strange, finned, tubular car in which he hoped to break the land speed record, travelling as close as he could to 800 miles an hour. He had often said he could hardly wait to try.

In his 30s Mr Fossett had typed out a list of things to do that included, rather than putting up shelves or going to the gym, doing all the World Loppet cross-country skiing marathons, swimming the English Channel and climbing the highest mountain on each continent. He did them all, except for climbing Everest, for which he found he did not have the patience. But he also took part in the Le Mans 24-hour car race, the Boston Marathon and the Iditarod dog-sled race in Alaska. He performed the fastest sail circumnavigation, the fastest sail transatlantic crossing and the highest flight in a glider, nine miles (15.5km) above the Andes. By sea or by air he set 116 records, of which 60 still stand, sewing them up (ever the keen Eagle Scout) like badges on his arm.

You could tell by the look of him that he was no thrill-seeker: a plump man, even plumper in a pressurised suit, who had to breathe in sharply to wriggle into the tiny capsules on his record-breaking craft, and whose thin grey hair lifted in the wind as he struggled out again. You could tell it, too, by his soft unhurried voice. There was no self-promotion, only method and doggedness. He was an inexperienced sailor when he crossed the Pacific alone in 20 days in 1996; a novice skier when he did the World Loppet; and a man with a mere 11 lessons under his belt when he began to try to balloon round the world. It took six attempts. He swam the Channel on his fourth attempt, the slowest crossing that year, at the age of 41.

A five-mile fall

Risk-management was the key to his achievements. He learned that skill as a toddler, driving the family car only a careful half-a-block rather than heading for the highway; and he reinforced it in his first career, as a stock-options trader on the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. Through the market plunge of the late 1970s and the Reagan boom of the 1980s, Mr Fossett rented out exchange memberships in Chicago and New York, making a fortune. The money then paid for his adventures, in premium equipment and proper training. Perhaps his shrewdest move was to take out a $500,000 insurance policy that would pay him $3m if his global balloon flight succeeded. Everything was carefully calculated: so much so, that his friend and sponsor Mr Branson supposed he was half-man, half-android.

Yet not everything could be controlled, as he was well aware. His autobiography, “Chasing the Wind”, acknowledged his dependence on “partnering” every variation of air and weather to speed his unsteered balloons and his sails. He confessed he was terrified of being shot down as he drifted over hostile lands. Although his worst accident was man-made, messing up a training jump, he had several hair-raising brushes with nature: tumbling down a glacier on the Eiger, crash-landing in a tree in India and, on his fourth balloon attempt, plunging five miles into the Coral Sea with the canopy on fire.

Since he had survived that, his friends thought he could come through anything; that some weeks after his departure in the Bellanca that September morning he would reappear, strolling amiably down the road, “and have another story to tell”. But even the most modern scanning and mapping technology could not find him, or the blue fabric of his aircraft, in the sage-scrub and desert in which his risk-planning seems finally to have failed him.